#saturdayff (inspired by Holly's post about BattleBots returning) In 2001, some co-workers at TiVo built a robot for competition in BattleBots season 3 -- "Fast Forward." TiVo was a sponsor for the season, so a lot of us got free tickets to see the show. I spent a weekend on Treasure Island watching the robot fights. Glimpses of me appeared on TV. - http://battlebots.wikia.com/wiki...
Feb 7, 2015
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They don't show the prelims, but there were several rounds without audience and cameras (and with the arena hazards disabled). Fast Forward qualified in the prelims, then beat its early round competitor ("The Annihilator") to advance to a quarterfinal match that they told us would be on the air. But we lost in quarterfinals to a bot named "Twin Paradox" (which then lost in the semifinals). As it turned out, that quarterfinal match with TiVo's bot was never aired.
- Stephen Mack
I can remember the face of the engineer who did most of the work, but not his name. He put a ton of hours into it, and had several of our hardware team members help him out. He had other sponsors as well.
- Stephen Mack
Watching the matches live on Treasure Island was fun. I remember a few things about it now (crazy that it's nearly 14 years later):
- Stephen Mack
1. I wanted to get Carmen Electra's autograph, but they must have taped her interviews very early or very late, because I never saw her around.
- Stephen Mack
2. They had a massive hangar next door to the arena where you could see the builders work on their bots, and drive them around in roped off areas. They didn't let anyone who wasn't a builder enter, though, because of the bots being weaponized.
- Stephen Mack
3. The announcers aren't there at all. Their commentary is added after the fact, not live.
- Stephen Mack
4. All the bits where you see the audience rooting for a particular robot, or holding banners -- those are all staged. Production assistants would walk around during the downtime and ask for volunteers to wave banners that were pre-made, or cheer for certain bots.
- Stephen Mack
5. The downtime between fights was really long -- usually 2 hours.
- Stephen Mack
6. The fights themselves, though, were the real deal. None of the ones that I watched were staged in any way, or redone, or seemed to be decided in advance.
- Stephen Mack
7. The builders were very chill, signing autographs and answering questions during the downtime. (2001 was before I had kids, but I invited along some kids of my friends who were interested. They loved it.)
- Stephen Mack
Before one match, they had the 49ers cheerleaders show up and do a routine and give away t-shirts.
- Stephen Mack
I think we ended up going back on two different weekends (or maybe later we had tickets to season 4 in November, which was also taped on Treasure Island). I'd catch glimpses of myself and the friends I took with me in the background of the matches sometimes. I swear this is me standing up and turning with my back to the camera in the lower left of the screen at 1:04 in https://www.youtube.com/watch... (but you never see my face in this clip).
- Stephen Mack
Holly's post is: http://friendfeed.com/hollysu...
- Stephen Mack